Many important and useful applications for software agents require multiple agents on a network that communicate with each other. Such agents must find each other and perform a useful joint computation without having to know about every other such agent on the network.As an example, this paper describes a matchmaker system, designed to find people with similar interests and introduce them to each other. The matchmaker is designed to introduce everyone, unlike conventional Internet media which only allow those who take the time to speak in public to be known. The paper details how the agents that make up the matchmaking system can function in a decentralized fashion, yet group themselves into clusters which reflect their users’ interests; these clusters are then used to
Leonard N. Foner